Afterwards, Sir Ranulph Fiennes found out what it feels like to cut your fingers off with a Black & Decker vise and a saw in your toolshed, too.

It was a full moon that night, and the temperature was -45 degrees Fahrenheit. In the moonlight, the arctic landscape resembles a fairyland. There are ice blocks of every shape and size, and they can look like elephants or skyscrapers or demons, and the snow is just the most lovely color.

I was a week into attempting the first solo, unsupported trek to the North Pole from Canada. Before leaving, I had worked it out that the trip would take eighty days and I would need about five hundred pounds of kit and food. Being fifty-five years old and pretty geriatric, I had to divide it between two sledges, which meant that for every mile I moved, I had to ski three, leapfrogging the sledges.

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Now, -45 degrees is cold, but if there's no wind, it's really lovely. Unfortunately there was a wind of five knots, and even that cuts you like a knife. If you open your mouth and try to melt snow on your tongue, the ice will stick and fizz. And then comes the blood.

I had come upon a thirty-foot-high wall of ice that night. I managed to get to the top of the wall when one of the sledges started sliding over the other side. I grabbed it and held on, but it weighed three hundred pounds and dragged me over the edge. The sledge was badly damaged, so I had to backtrack many miles to Ward Hunt Island, where I knew there was an abandoned hut; I had built it on an expedition twenty years earlier.

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I repaired the sledge and set out a second time. All was going well when I came to an area of broken ice with a lot of black sea, plenty of movement. The ice was making a lot of noise -- like Tchaikovsky, which is bad for the imagination.

I was towing the first sledge when it slipped sideways down a ridge and slid about ten feet into the sea. I clattered down the ridge, and my foot and ski went into the water. I needed to pull the sledge out, simple as that. It had the radio, the beacon, and seventy days' worth of food. But somewhere underneath the ice blocks, the rope was snagged.

I couldn't get it out without lying on my stomach and putting my hand in. You can't wear waterproof gloves because they don't sweat, so I took the mitts off my left hand and fiddled around under the water, and luckily I unsnagged it.

The water wasn't all that cold -- probably about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But when I got my arm out of the water, it started getting cold very quickly. My fingers -- which were clenched around the rope with three hundred pounds at the other end -- felt like dead wood. They weren't bendable.

My feet were slipping, and I was standing on an ice block that was sinking. So it was a sticky situation. It was about five minutes of extreme work to drag the sledge to the top of the ridge. When I got there, my first thought was to get blood back down into my fingers. You do this with a simple windmill motion, which uses centrifugal force to make the blood go down. It was the first time in my life that the blood didn't go back down. My fingers had gone past the point of no return.

Then I was getting body shivers, which I've seen in other people over the years: hypothermia. I knew I didn't have very long to do two things -- one, to get the tent up, and two, to start the gasoline stove to warm up my hand. Both of these things you can easily do with two hands, but with one hand that's got no feeling and the other getting numb, you need to be very quick.

I put up the tent partially. I couldn't handle the matches, but I had a lighter. I held the stove in my mouth and lit it with my good hand. After warming my hand, I skied eight hours back to the hut on Ward Island. I was in a bad way. I got the beacon going and got in touch with the bush pilots down in Resolute Bay. They diverted a ski plane, and I found old tins and rags in the hut, poured some of the cooking fuel on them, and lit them near a flat bit of sea ice. The pilot made an incredible landing, and I eventually ended up in Ottawa General Hospital.

I stayed in an oxygen chamber for sixty hours. Then I went back to the UK, where a British navy expert explained that frostbite amputation should wait until at least five months after the accident because the semidamaged areas take that long to get back to the point where they can be pulled as flaps over the newly cut areas.

The dead ends of my fingers were very black, and every time I touched one of them against something, it was agonizing. Eventually I thought, Well, why don't I get rid of them? So I used a Black & Decker vise and a saw in the toolshed. It wasn't that painful, but going through the bones was quite difficult. It felt better afterward, since I was much less likely to hit things with my fingers. The surgeon would later be upset that I did that.

More than half of my thumb had to be cut off, and about one third of the other four fingers went. Now I can do everything except button my right-hand sleeve. I just have a problem with the cold. My hand doesn't like the cold.
—As told to Daniel Torday

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records as "The World's Greatest Living Explorer." His team was the first to circumnavigate the globe on its polar axis, and he was the first (with Dr. Mike Stroud) to make an unsupported trek across Antarctica. He is also a cousin of actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.